"I want you and you are not here." Over the past year, my LA-based love and I have been sending each other songs (her) and poems (me) to help bridge the intermittent distance between us. These are some of the poems.

She wants a house full of cups and the ghostsof last century’s lesbians; I want a spotlessapartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove,three cords of ash, an axe; I wanta clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars:oats, coriander, thick green oil;I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders,linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesleyreunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’sreflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl,steam rising from rice. She wants goats,chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I wantwind from the river freshening cleared rooms.She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’stenderness. Touch ancient as the river.I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.She’s in her city, meetingher deadline; I’m in my mill village out latewith the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinkingof the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.We’ve kissed all weekend; we wantto drive the hundred miles and try it again.

I want you and you are not here. I pausein this garden, breathing the colour thought isbefore language into still air. Even your nameis a pale ghost and, though I exhale it againand again, it will not stay with me. TonightI make you up, imagine you, your movements clearerthan the words I have you say you said before.

Whereever you are now, inside my head you fix mewith a look, standing here whilst cool late lightdissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,inventing love, until the calls of nightjarsinterrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.

To think of gratitude and to think of thank you cardsinstead, the small panic of them, the pressureto buy the ones with black and white Parisian photographcovers and the blank insides, ready for your profound message,you writer, you beautiful liar; you are supposed to be good at this.

So you write, Thank you for the flowers. I don’t knowwhat to call them, but they are pink and I planon taking them to bed with me in your absence. You write,Thank you for the reminder you’re eight hundred miles away.You draw pictures of hot air balloons and trolley cars andinaccurate maps of the United States with dash dashed arrowroutes that point from one stick person holding flowersto another stick person empty handed.

And when it is too hard to be thankful for anythingother than the fact that at least the two of you aren’t dead yet,you call, despite the time zone difference and impossible hour,to say, Walk west so that I can hear your footsteps better.

Love, it was good to talk to you tonight.You lather me like summer though. I lightup, sip smoke. Insistent through walls comesthe downstairs neighbor’s double-bass. It thrumslike toothache. I will shower away the sweat,

imagining around your voice, you, late-awake there. (It isn’t midnight yethere.) This last glass washes down the crumbs.I wish that I could lie down in your armsand, turned toward sleep there (later), say, "Goodnight,love, It was good."

Here I love you. In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.A silver gull slips down from the west.Sometimes a sail. High, high stars. Oh the black cross of a ship.Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.Far away the sea sounds and resounds.This is a port.

Here I love you.Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.I love you still among these cold things.Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vesselsthat cross the sea towards no arrival.I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.

The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.I love what I do not have. You are so far.My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.And as I love you, the pines in the windwant to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

I think of you and the continents brilliant and aridand the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morningand your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York

see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you Standing on the edge of the purple like an only treeand in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver like glasses like and old ladies hairIt’s well known that God and I don’t get along together It’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moorsseen through you the great works of death, you are greater

Late night and rain wakes me, a downpour,wind thrashing in the leaves, hugeears, huge feathers,like some chased animal, a giantdog or wild boar. Thunder & shiveringwindows; from the tin roofthe rush of water.

I lie askew under the net,tangled in damp cloth, salt in my hair.When this clears there will be fireflies& stars, brighter than anywhere,which I could contemplate at timesof panic. Lightyears, think of it.

Skin remembers how long the years growwhen skin is not touched, a gray tunnelof singleness, feather lost from the tailof a bird, swirling onto a step,swept away by someone who never sawit was a feather. Skin ate, walked,slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin feltit was never seen, never known asa land on the map, nose like a city,hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosqueand the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.Love means you breathe in two countries.And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.Even now, when skin is not alone,it remembers being alone and thanks something largerthat there are travelers, that people go placeslarger than themselves.

I am coming, Sal.In a beat-up Plymouth, powered by stars.Down a road of stars through trees of stars.Every button of my brand new suit is a star.My cufflinks, stars, I wear a star in my lapel.I washed my hair with a handful of stars.The sky shaken loose, I lathered my beard.I’m coming to you with a bouquet of stars.With a blanket of stars & a basket of stars.With a bottle of stars & a banquet of stars.For years I have pulled stars from my body:Here is the joy, here is the grief, here isthe slaughter I have shaped into stars.I have polished the stars & buried them.Stars of my nipples, stars of my knees,stars of my vertebrae, stars of my lungs.An orchard has grown, it is heavy & yours.I will gather the fruit & transport it to you.See how it falls from my pockets & armpits.My bones are stars & the stars are for you.My wound is a star & my wound is for you.We’ll hold these stars to each other’s lips.& drink the ghosts from each other’s stars.I am coming to you with a wedding of stars,a meadow of stars & a chuppah of stars,a book of stars with our song written in it.If the hush returns with its claws unbrokenwe’ll be there Sal, with stars in our knuckles,stars in our hammer, stars in our singing.A volley of stars will pummel this country.The absence, eaten by packs of stars.A voice will speak in the voice of a star.A voice will speak & the river will stand.The river will stand & I love you Sally.I love you Sally & the river will carveour names into the dark.